Edward’s Diary Entry 5 - Life Plan?

I set to work on my Life Plan. I don’t know many people who have one. But my first idea was to set up an altar. We need all the help and inspiration we can get, so we have to arrange things accordingly. A long time ago in Germany, I once had a Meditation Room, a spare room with wooden floors I had to varnish and white walls, which I never decorated in any way, and it contained only a mat or cushion to sit on so I could look at a blank wall, or adopt a yoga position and try to keep my mind on one single theme, or kneel and combine physical with mental exercises. Tough job. It eventually petered out due to changing life circumstances, but it was a good experience. Now I don’t have a spare room, so I decided to set up a little corner in my bedchamber for meditational pursuits and mental exercises. That took a month to fix up, off and on, as the actual altar – a 3-shelf white bookcase from Ikea – with a few picture frames, candles and family mementos, had to be discretely hideable behind a curtain, and that required some doing. This is because one wise man said “meditation is a mad man’s business, so it is best to have a separate room for it.” But by the end of the month, everything started fitting into place – in my mind, in my room and with the various odds and ends I needed to realise my initial plan. I had my shelf, I made a poster with a series of pictures that, for me, represented the 26 Virtues described in Chapter XVI of the Bhagavad Gita, my flower vase, candles, pictures, and odds and ends, including a century-old Franciscan olive wood rosary, which I picked up at an antique dealers mostly for the cross, which I needed for another project, deciding to place the rest of the actual rosary on one of my altar shelves – you never know, maybe that friar was in communion with the Lord, and it would help me to realise Truth at some point. In any case, for the time being, I was to study the Virtues as given. Ah, sorry for being so antiquated. In today’s hyperconnected world, I have just seen that the Gita may have been written in what modern people like to envisage as those savage ancient times, as it is said that “Lord Krishna spoke the Bhagavad-Gita on the battlefield of Kuruksetra in 3102 B.C.; just prior to the commencement of the Mahabharata war. This date corresponds to 1700 years before Moses, 2500 years before Buddha, 3000 years before Jesus and 3800 years before Mohammed.” Or soon to be 5118 years ago! What was a 21st-century man like me doing with a text like that? Well, as a teenager, I had heard about the Gita, and my family knew a man who tried to put it into practise at that time. He was also a devotee of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, of which we heard quite a lot. But recently, my renewed source came from India, once again, from the teachings of the Shivapuri Baba. I’ll explain in forthcoming entries, if you want to stick with me… not without saying that, yes, wisdom from 5 millennia ago can be updated and used together with our “modern knowledge” quite comfortably, but that comes later…. have to close now.

Edward's Diary Entry 4 - Charity?

And so after my talk with Guru Nanda, I was left to myself… I re-read a few books. Yes, I had read them before, but I still thought I would find some new meanings here and there. But nine months ago, something finally clicked. My life was pretty much in order, but five decades of “karma” had taken their toll, and I still had a few odds and ends to work out. Especially, as I mentioned before, since I’d been quite a non-conformist. So it was a surprise when I actually expressed a thought to Ximena and realised I was talking seriously. Ximena is a generous person who believes in charity and actually does it. I, on the other hand, thought I had never been very charitable. Maybe I was incapable of being generous, or I feared that I might not know how or whom to actually give to. Charity seemed like a burden. So when I found myself repeating a phrase from an Indian “holy man”, that if people practised charity well, there would be no disorder in the world, and that 10% of one’s earnings should go to charity (with a threefold subdivisions as well), it suddenly dawned on me that there was no excuse. See the quote on the Extras page. Reading and talking was no longer enough. I saw I had to implement a strategy to actually do something. So I worked out a plan. I calculated my 10% and divided it into thirds, more or less, and simply started from that very same week. Now every month, and every day of the month when necessary, I give to others, and thank them in my mind for giving me an opportunity to help – if of course the help really helps, which is also difficult to take responsibility for, but that’s another question. In fact, it was at that time that I worked out the beginning of what would become my new “Life Plan”. I knew that an emotional personality like mine often has to seek order to be able to cope with life’s challenges. And that’s how I started with my initial plan… And a new struggle began.

The Three Brothers - Part 1 The Body

	The Three Brothers: A First Look at Self-Awareness In 3 parts: Who am I? My body? My feelings? My thoughts? Part 1: Am I my body?

Three brothers trapped in a pen, looking out from behind the fence and wondering when they will be fed. They are going to market. They were “born to die”. But before they do, they are pampered and cared for properly – for up to 6 months, feeding from their mothers, helped by milk supplements if she hasn’t got enough milk. They play in the sunshine, they run and jump on the fresh, green grass. They bleat and call, and their mother answers them, always. They lead healthy and happy little lives. And then they are inevitably shipped to market and sacrificed. Their bodies are required for higher purposes. Life is sweet, oh so short, if they could be aware of it… To them, humans are like Gods:  caring for them, yes, but prescribing their fate, as in Greek epics.

To become “aware” of ourselves, we have to start by noticing something. So let’s take the first of the “Three Bothers” – instinct, the one on the right of the picture – and talk about him. He is trapped in a pen, says the introduction. The pen is the body. When do we notice our bodies? When we look in the mirror and see if we’re getting a little too plump, or see a few more wrinkles? Or maybe when it’s a bad hair day? Or I’ve just bought a new jacket and want to see how it fits? That’s not what we mean by body. That’s looking at our outer clothing, the way we and others see us from outside. Our bodily functions normally proceed without our noticing them. Until you get a cold, you don’t notice the way you breathe peacefully through your nose. Until your throat gets sore, you don’t think twice about swallowing your favourite titbit. When you knock your knee against a chair and “see stars”, you notice you have a patella, and it’s pretty delicate!

Our “awareness” of our bodies is quite low on the scale of daily activities, unless we train for sports or do physical exercise. But the body is a marvellous thing. It mostly operates below the threshold of awareness, taking care of everything for you: breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure, nutrition, excretion, instinctive reactions, skills and special abilities that you have maybe worked on, sense perceptions through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and the skin, all vying with one another to get interpreted in the brain so they can produce reactions… and so on. Billions and billions of cells (no one can really know how many), all doing their work properly, until they start acting up for some reason or other. And they are all “you”, although most cells die out quite quickly and are replaced by new ones, some say every 7 years, some every 10, but they’re all still “you” – the “you” that may persist as long as the body lives.

Obviously, all this “work” going on without too much input from your “awareness” is a good thing. It keeps you alive. It regulates itself. It shows there is intelligence at work in the universe whether you are aware of it or not. This intelligence works in our human body, and it works in the terrestrial body of the Earth. Today we are coming to a more global outlook and understand that whatever humans do affects the whole planet and the planet will invariably adapt to what we do, and this is the true working of intelligence: adaptation. The kind of adaptation we need to understand ourselves and our capacity to experience Awareness.

What do we achieve by practising Awareness and placing this sense of Self in the body? This is a first step to understanding the universe, which is not somewhere “out there”, but inside us. Awareness assists our understanding by taking us out of our thinking and emotional processes to focus attention on some of the simple things we so often take for granted. We are so absorbed, so wrapped up in our thoughts and feelings most of the time. We are captured by our very artificial, abstract, man-made world, especially nowadays. The world seems real enough to our sense perceptions, but how “real” is it really? To start finding out, it is enough for our purpose of practising Awareness to bring our attention regularly into the body. If we are not lucky enough to live in contact with Nature – in the countryside or the mountains, where we can be inspired by non-man-made things – we can certainly commune with Nature by centring on a few natural processes inside ourselves.

This is how we can see if we are attentive, and if there is a “body” and something else which I call “me”. I sometimes command the body to do things I don’t like, and at other times the body does things without my thinking about it. I force myself to get up in the morning even if I don’t really “want to”. When driving I step on the brake as soon as I see something crossing the road even without thinking. So there should be no doubt that “I” am not simply my “body”. Although I am inextricably bound to this body, inhabit it and have to learn to live with it, if we look closely, we can see a body, a pattern of feelings and a thought process. These are our three brothers, like the ram lambs in the picture. Or maybe the “three bags full” of the nursery rhyme “Baa, baa black sheep…” (although this may have other meanings too). So where is Awareness in this picture? It is somehow “outside” the body, the feelings and the thoughts. Awareness is not a thought, or a feeling. You can think and talk about Awareness, but that is not being Aware. So where can we place Awareness? Answer: the Awareness in you is you. Long periods of awareness means you are more present in your own life. Only fleeting moments of awareness means you are missing out on life – not necessarily on instinct, bodily movements, feelings and thinking, no. That can all happen with minimum awareness. But a lot of other things can also happen with minimum awareness: stress, nervousness, pain, suffering, misery, discontent, irritability, fear, dislike, misunderstandings, anger, arrogance, resentment, injury, cruelty, hatred, violence… Because only greater Awareness brings a sense of proportion to life, where you begin to conquer man-made, social conditioning and rise above your basic human condition.

So here’s something practical to do about Awareness, to test out the assertions made above. It’s no use simply reading about Self-Awareness, higher states of consciousness, spiritual development or human evolution. We have to actually be able to practise it and come to our own understanding of it. This is why the International Self-Awareness Day blog aims to make this journey practical, apart from being theoretical. But only YOU can practise it. No one else can do it for you. And it’s the only real way you can change the world. By effecting this change – or allowing it to happen – within you.

Awareness Exercise 1

Awareness can be sensed first in the body. It is the opposite of a physical exercise in which you tense or contract a set of muscles. We should call tensing muscles “feeling”, whereas placing Awareness, or a sense of “me” in a part of my body, is called “sensing”. If you haven’t already tried it, this is what you can do:

Decide to spend 10 minutes with yourself, by yourself. Choose a quiet place where you can sit down without any interruptions. Pick any part of your body. The hands are good to start with. After breathing calming seven or nine times (or however many you want) to start relaxing, place your “Awareness” or sense of “I” in your right hand and repeat mentally: “I am in my right hand. I wish my right hand to relax.” You do not tense your right hand at all, you let it relax. Do this three times over, experiencing a sense of “being present” in your hand.

If you find your thoughts wandering, try to connect with your breathing, so that you have some degree of attention on your inspiration and expiration, and the rest of your awareness is on the sensation of “you” being in your right hand. You may have a slight tingling sensation in your hand, perhaps warmth or a certain degree of heaviness.

After three times in your right hand, switch to your left hand and do the same. Then try going back to your right and then your left again. Three times round each hand for three whole rounds equals a total of nine times. Slowly and calmly.

If following your natural breathing makes you feel drowsy, or you see your thoughts wandering, or you get stuck, try counting numbers with each breathe, or change your breathing rhythm, holding your breath for say 2 counts in and 2 counts out, and then change back to natural breathing again if necessary.

What happens? Were you able to maintain your attention? Awareness or attention is what makes you specifically human.  The fact that "you" can place Awareness in your body – or find it difficult at first but others can – indicates that you are more than your body. It is a reality that you can see for yourself.  If you are interested, ask about a complete “I-Placement” session for the whole body. 

Quiz 1

What’s the most frequently-used noun or “naming word” in the English language? Can you guess? 

Here’s a hint: It’s closer to you than anything else. It’s small and short. It’s the cause of all your problems, and the solution to all your problems. No need to look in a Thesaurus, just look inside yourself. Getting warm?

Edward’s Diary Entry 3

I have always been a non-conformist. Maybe I was lucky, because I was brought up in several countries, so that set the stage for calm confusion in life! Then I saw a TV programme at the age of 4 that said that in a magical place called “The Land of Hatchy Milatchy”, “if you should fall, the ground’s made of rubber and you bounce like a ball”. Later that day I was running around the driveway and fell and scraped my knee and felt sick in my stomach. The combination of sensing pain, feeling sick and thinking “that was a lie, it hurts when you fall”, was the first tripartite memory I have – a complete memory of sensing, feeling and thinking at the same time. Oh dear, how many other “lies” were to be discovered too – in the world and in myself! I roamed and travelled. I was a vegetarian, I rode round southern England and Spain on a bicycle. I motorcycled through France. I lived and worked in Germany. I was involved in teaching. I settled in Spain. My collection of philosophical, self-help and self-development books increased. On the surface I was more or less "normal", but inside my mind, things were “not quite right”. There had to be more meaning to life than just accepting the status quo, right? So when last year I met Guru Nanda and asked if he would be my teacher, he just smiled at me, stepped on my foot, and said “I hereby declare you... your own teacher. Be that!”
What, again? No dependency, and back to square one? Yep, like Alan Watts told us, remembering the Japanese proverb: “Seven times down, eight times up – that’s life!”

What is Self-Awareness?

Self-Awareness state 0

You “know” what dreamless sleep is like. You’re very tired, you fall asleep, you have no dreams, and you wake up. You have no idea where you were, no memory of dreaming or thinking, nothing. You went into deep dreamless sleep. That’s Consciousness state 0. Nothingness. Perhaps the mind goes back to the Source. The personal individuality is non-existent, and yet you “reincarnate” and come back to the same world when you wake up: the same world inside your head and in the world of people and things. And it happens again and again every night. We don’t know what it is, but if we reflect on it, we know we have had this personal experience, we “know” we have disappeared and have come back again. So this is the idea of dreamless sleep. It is “Self-Awareness 0” or simply “The Unknown”.

Self-Awareness state 1

REM stage sleep is the dreaming phase. You know you dream. Sometimes you remember your dreams, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you dream more often, sometimes less. We all agree that human beings have a state called dreaming, and we see this state in our pets too, with movements, spasm or sounds. So we know more about this state because some consciousness is present, and we remember it. It is Self-Awareness 1. “Awareness of the Dream World”.

Self-Awareness state 2

So what happens when we “wake up” from sleeping and dreaming? We enter Self-Awareness 2, called “normal waking existence”, “normal consciousness”, in which we immediately start thinking, feeling, sensing and acting as so-called “normal humans beings”, and the norm is whatever a given culture or civilisation says is “normal”. In this state, unlike dreaming – in which we are passive and cannot harm anyone – our mindset, our thinking process, and our impulses and feelings are all directed outwards to what we call the physical world around us (we are conditioned to accept it as reality) and the representative of this state of consciousness, the Ego, starts to differentiate between what we call “good and bad” and all the other pairs of opposites. My good is not your good; my bad is never exactly your bad, and all the arguments ensue from this egocentric positioning. With this individualistic, “me-against-the-world” attitude, we can actually do harm to others, to ourselves, to things and other life-forms, and of course to the Planet itself. Today, anyone with any level of “environmental” awareness knows this. Since the 1940s, man has the means to destroy the planet, and if bombs won’t do it, then gradual climate change, pollution, overpopulation or famine may. This is part of Reality, and it is normal and natural. But this is because we, as human beings, are not really fully CONSCIOUS or SELF-AWARE. The whole point of any human evolution, development, mental or spiritual growth, is to become more human, more conscious, more SELF-AWARE. This state 2, “Normal Waking Consciousness”, is not enough to ensure peace and prosperity for all. When we look at the world around us we see this. It is egocentric, egoic, separatist, and non-integrated. We wonder why there are wars and killings in the world, but we accept and take for granted that we can get angry with someone we love or with a neighbour or a stranger. This Normal Waking State depends on ethnic, cultural, social, family and personal conditioning. It is merely an initial state of being human, like the raw material for humanness. But even so, every human being (by the mere fact of being born human) already has a higher state of consciousness (just as the United Nations says we already have natural inherent or inborn “rights”). Perhaps better to say the higher consciousness is already in us. The trick is that we don’t know it yet. So level 2 is a dark state of consciousness (see "Levels" page No. 1) (much like sleeping, except that we’re in an active state) in which the human being presents an EGO or “I”, which is generally not interested in further analysis, because this analysis may be painful and dangerous to this EGO or “I”, which wants protection at all costs. It is not that mankind is totally unconscious, it’s that we can – and must – become more conscious to become more human and continue our “evolution”.

Self-Awareness state 3

SELF-AWARENESS state 3, also called PRESENCE, DE-CONDITIONED CONSCIOUSNESS, THE ETERNAL NOW, or PRESENT MOMENT LIVING, or ACCEPTING WHAT IS - AS IT IS, or REAL HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS – this is what we at IS-AD mean by “SELF-AWARENESS”. Self-Awareness SEES, SENSES and FEELS that 1) my body is not all that I am; 2) my feelings are not all that I am comprised of; 3) my thoughts are not necessarily ME either: some I control, some I do not; 4) In fact, there is at times an Observer in me, an Awareness in me, that WATCHES or WITNESSES these natural functions as they operate and sometimes – depending on our state of mind or being – is taken over and engulfed by the experience, and sometimes stands apart from the experience and simply observes it. This is an initial state of the deconditioned mind, which is freer than a conditioned mind and better able to perceive “Reality”. Self-Awareness seems to want to be part of the human being, we are born with a potential for it. But the question is, does the human being want to accept and cultivate Self-Awareness? Maybe Shakespeare was asking this when he put the famous words in Hamlet’s mouth, “To be, or not to be; that is the question.”

This is the basic thesis of this blog. That it is possible to cultivate a higher state of mind, a state of Self-Awareness, in which conditioning (uncontrolled habits, behaviour patterns, wrong thinking, wrong feeling, wrong acting) can be observed, detected… and corrected with patience and perseverance.

So what experiences of “Self-Awareness” have you had? Ask yourself: How do I know if I am more AWARE? Have I had the sensation of a sudden cessation of thinking and actually just seen something as if it were the first time ever? Do I really listen when someone I love talks to me? Have I heard that bird singing even though the street was full of busy traffic? Do I have to be a poet to enjoy this, or can anyone do it? Am I simply too busy with my “problems”, my “thoughts”, my “hurry-hurry-have-to-get-there-on-time”, or “why did that stupid neighbour give me another scowl this morning?” Am I trapped in thought and stressed out most of the time? Or do I have a modicum of Awareness that makes me happier? Your comments please. 

Do you experience Self-Awareness (S-A)?

Edward’s Diary Entry 2

Blog up and running. Facebook too... Let’s go back in time to about 2 years ago. I have always been a questioner, and when a friend said there was a weekend seminar about Enneagram personality types, I went. I knew something about the Enneagram, originally brought from esoteric sources to the West by Gurdjieff, and later developed for personalities by Riso-Hudson. For me the workshop was an eye-opener. And an ego-pounder. I thought I “knew myself” a little, what with so many introspections, self-help books and study. I suddenly saw why my personality was what it was, there was no escaping it. The explanation for so many things was all there. And the explanation of other people’s sometimes strange ways and confusing behaviour as well. It was a wonderful way to initiate new relationships with people with a different idea – we are all trapped by our basic personalities, but we have to remember that behind the mask, the persona, we are all united by our essential nature as human beings. This is a great way to forgive others and forgive oneself for things that we say and do. There is nothing like actually doing something about oneself instead of just reading about and dreaming about self-development! Friends and acquaintances started getting interested, and personality types became one of our favourite subjects of conversation, and observation. That was another new beginning after many beginnings in the life that has been given to me. More anon…

Edward's Diary Entry 1

I sat down with Guru Nanda the other day and told him what was on my mind: that I had a lot of material and documentation on things spiritual and mental, and that this wasn’t being used fully – except by me. Oh yes, I was happy I had had so much help and support in the past, and thanks to him, I was quite established in my daily routines and my (incipient) sensations of presence and self-awareness, but I was thinking of setting up a way to share this with others. So I said I had decided to become a blogger. He smiled and said, “Yes, maybe that’s a good exercise for you. My blessing to you.” I starting saying more, and trying to explain, talking about charity and help and things, but he just looked at me, quizzically, and smiled sweetly, as he usually does. “You mean you don’t see anything wrong with it?” I asked. “No, you want to help others, that is good. Help was given to you, now others maybe need help.” He walked to the window and looked out. A breeze was blowing. Some leaves were scuttling past on the pavement.... I spent a few days analysing my timetable and commitments, and decided I had the time and energy, and this is why I am opening this blog in November 2015 and planning to continue at least until July 2016. It will be a two-way kind of affair, in remembrance of the wise saying that “one hand washes another”, because by sharing experiences, maybe others – like the prospective readers I hope for – will be helped, and the exercise of doing this work will also be good for me personally and others around me. So onwards and upwards, decision made. Welcome to the unfolding of Self-Awareness Day. For me it’s every day of the year. Let’s celebrate it together.

Presenting IS-AD, International Self-Awareness Day

We’re preparing this blog and arranging content to start up soon. Hope you’ll like it. We’ll use English, and also post some information in Spanish, to address both the English and Spanish-speaking community around the world. 

El "Día Internacional de la Conciencia Personal", o de la conciencia de sí, es un evento que celebramos todos los días del año si nos interesa vivir el presente y conocernos mejor.